Friday, December 5, 2014

I believe it was right about a year ago in 2013, that I discovered this next game that I'm gonna be talking about called "F.E.A.R. Online". And because this game was related to the F.E.A.R. series of video games, which was so successful, I was pretty much hyped and excited to look into what this online version would offer.

However, because it was still closed to the general public back then, I had to put it on the back burner instead...but had been checking back to see when it would start its open beta (which it did in October 2014).

Anyway, it wasn't until I was in the midst of covering Defiance still, that I found out about the open beta and so proceeded to downloading (and trying out) the game.

But long story short, it wasn't quite as exciting as I had hoped it would be.

In my mind, or what my imagination made it out to be, I had hoped that it would stick back and follow the original genre it had. One of paranormal, psychological and horror kind of feel...much like Silent Hill or the like...one that would keep your adrenaline pumped up. Well...at least for the multiplayer Co-Op parts (which should presumably follow the storyline).

Certainly, I shouldn't be the only one to think and feel that it would be nice if we could be scared by the game together with another couple of friends right?

But as far as that "thought" was concerned, only a sliver of it was found in the tutorial section of the game. The look and feel that I had expected was found there and it had my adrenaline going for a tad bit whilst I was in there...never quite knowing what to expect.

Especially this part where you had to pass through the hospital's morgue. You just know that something's BOUND to happen in there and yet you must go through it in order to pass to the next area.

And just when you thought that only a couple of those chambers would open to scare you...WHAM!...all of them did instead. (Though that was pretty much just about it. Nothing ever did came out. Hahahaha.)

However, sad to say, the rest of the game was just your usual online FPS gimmick. Stuff that you could find in just about any other games of the same kind, Death Match, Demolition, Knife Fights, etc...

Anyway, let's take a closer look at the game, shall we?

The Download

The downloading of the game client is unexpectedly smooth I should say. All you need is to install "Aeria Ignite" (the publisher's "download manager") and it will help u to manage everything else.

With it, you can temporarily pause your downloads to regain your bandwidth whilst loading articles and surfing the web. Or you can close it, shutdown your PC and resume it at a more appropriate time. Its simply "beautiful" for us users with slow internet connections.

But a couple of minor hiccups that I should mention is that...although the game client is resume-able, the patching isn't. For the patching part, you WILL have to finish it through one sitting or risk having to start all over again, I'm afraid.

What's more, each time you start up the client loader to try and play the game (despite having finished updating), you will still have to wait for a couple of minutes in order for it (the client loader) to do some forced "file checking" procedure (probably some uncaught bug in the program I reckon).

Its only after this checking is done, will you be able to enter the game and start playing.

As of this post still, the FEAR Online game folder is currently sitting in my HDD at about 7.40 GB in filesize.